figurative culptor

Category:Art / Creative

DescriptionMelissa Markowitz

Mtmarkowitz@gmail.com

Statement and Biography

Born and raised in South Florida, educated in private schools where I was the victim of social privilege, I was always aware that, for some reason, I had a different kind of social consciousness from my peers.

Unlike a social conscience, which relates to economic and political awareness, social consciousness relates to the manner in which people relate to themselves and each other. As a high school student, I didn’t frame that thought consciously; I merely knew that I was “way” different from the people around me. Once I escaped from the privileged environment of the private school milieu, and landed in a liberal college campus, I realized that I perceived social relationships from a completely different perspective: the outsider looking in.

I am something of a comedian, with a droll, dry sense of humor that is often expressed through personal rebellion, which often creates a wonderful cognitive dissonance when the audience contrasts my youthful, ugh, innocent appearance with the blatantly sexual themes with which I work. I am a comedian who expresses her humor about sex situations in clay.

We comedian often extract the content for our subject matter from the circumstances of our lives. We compile sets of rivaling lyrics to metaphorically and humorously compare our personal lives with the lives of the people around us, comparing the internal “I” with the outside “they”.

Over the past six years, I have a developed a body of work, a technique and an approach that revolves around my reactions to my social encounters, concentrating on smaller pieces, which I call “bookshelf sculpture.” Fairly innocuous looking at first glance, a closer inspection reveals images that reflect the terrible emotional carnage that the characters I’ve created have gone through in their lives. I have been told that my work grows on the observer the way a vague suspicion becomes a full-blown con